Arthur Tange, page 12
Policy on these and other external crises was often decided in meetings in Menzies’ office in Parliament House, bringing together three ministers—Menzies, Casey and McBride—and two departmental secretaries, Allen Brown of the Prime Ministers Department and Tange. The conspicuous absentee was the Secretary of the Defence Department, Sir Frederick Shedden, who was separated by both physical distance and intellectual disengagement. The departmental secretary since 1937, Shedden had achieved a great reputation for his dedication and efficiency during the 1939–45 war. Now, in his office in Victoria Barracks, Melbourne, Shedden seemed more concerned to rehearse his wartime association with Prime Minister John Curtin and General Douglas MacArthur than to give prompt and useful advice on current issues. Shedden was proud of what he called ‘the higher Defence machinery’, but in Tange’s view it produced documents that did indeed seem to have been created by a machine rather than a human mind, reiterating precedents at length but offering little relevant information or constructive advice. Within weeks of taking up his post. Tange was sharply criticising Shedden over Defence’s inability to give advice to ministers on ‘fastmoving events abroad’.158 A gap was opened into which External Affairs was able to expand, but Tange was frustrated by the way in which, as it seemed to him, his department was obliged to do Defence’s thinking as well as its own.
It is not easy to distinguish the strands of Tange’s personal contribution from the whole cloth of Australian policy. His advice was given, often orally, on topics that were politically sensitive, while Menzies and Casey were senior ministers with long experience in international affairs. Nevertheless, some clear emphases emerge from detailed reconstructions of these various crises, as well as a ‘Policy Critique’ that he submitted to Casey on 22 June 1955, nearly eighteen months into his Secretaryship.’159 With the Cold War in Asia moving into a more settled pattern, this document summarised views that Tange had developed during a decade’s first-hand experience in international affairs, sharpened by the events surrounding Dien Bien Phu, Geneva, Manila, the off-shore islands and Malaya.
It is a remarkable document, for it unabashedly criticised many crucial elements of current policy, especially as that policy was presented to the public. The Menzies government took every opportunity to point to its close relations with ‘great and powerful friends’. It proclaimed ANZUS and SEATO as evidence that, under a Liberal-Country Party coalition government, Australia could call upon these powerful friends—meaning Britain and, for a time, France as well as the United States—to ensure Australia’s protection against Chinese communism or any other threats that might emerge from Asia. Tange, by contrast, underlined the unwisdom of relying totally on great powers to protect Australian interests, citing ‘United Kingdom preoccupations with avoiding nuclear warfare, French incompetence and cynicism in Indo-China, [and] American clumsiness in Asia’ to illustrate the point.
The support of great powers was, he said, a great asset, but Australia was paying an unnecessarily high price even for ‘the supremely important American friendship’. In what was to become a constant theme for the next decade, Tange said that Australia should support the United States on fundamental issues but should differ publicly ‘for our other friends to see’ on lesser issues. Liberal opinion in the United States, he said, would welcome a lead from an independent democracy like Australia, and genuine allies could sometimes help the American administration ‘out of a box it has made for itself’. Australia should, for example, assert its strong interest in détente in American-Soviet relations. This would not only ensure that more resources were available to deter China, but also show other Asian nations that Australian concerns went beyond simple Cold War anti-communism to include the control of atomic weapons, the peaceful resolution of conflict and the direction of resources towards welfare and development.
In Tange’s critique, SEATO and ANZUS appeared by name solely as ‘handicaps’ to Australia’s proclaimed ‘good neighbour’ policy towards Asia. SEATO, he said, ‘connotes intervention in the affairs of Asia and “provocation”’, while ANZUS ‘connotes accord with U.S. foreign policy in Asia towards Peking, Chiang Kai-shek, [and] the Geneva Agreement’. Australia, Tange continued, relied too much on the Colombo Plan to support its ‘good neighbour’ policy, not realising that it would not compensate for Australian support for what was seen in Asia as ‘American intervention’ or ‘colonialism’. Australia should therefore offer at least some verbal support for the principles of the Geneva Agreement on Vietnam and distance itself from other colonial powers, such as Britain, France and Belgium, in United Nations discussions of colonial issues. Moreover, Australia should also show more sympathy for the hopes that Asian and other countries placed in the United Nations. A reputation for positive, co-operative and objective actions and attitudes in the United Nations would create goodwill towards Australia, thus supporting ‘the security we acquire through military treaties with the United States’. Tange particularly stressed that: ‘In an issue with Indonesia, we might find that American support was dependent upon the amount of support we found in the rest of the United Nations’.
Tange noted that, after considerable effort in the early 1950s, Australia’s defence and foreign policies had been brought into alignment, but he lamented External Affairs’ burden in having to deal with defence and strategic questions as well as the political and diplomatic aspects of external issues. Tange began and ended his account by calling for the government to give the department long-term objectives and priorities, rather than merely reacting ‘piecemeal’ to issues as they arose. He listed thirteen topics as worthy of such consideration, the first six of which were policy towards China, Malaya, Indonesia, Dutch New Guinea, SEATO and ANZUS.
This was a document that a departmental secretary might well have offered to a newly elected Labor government. Its arguments echoed some of Evatt’s favourite themes, such as the value of the United Nations, and foreshadowed others that appealed to later Labor ministers, such as Gough Whitlam’s eagerness to distance Australia from Western colonialism and Gareth Evans’s desire to see Australia established as a ‘good international citizen’. As advice to an increasingly entrenched conservative administration, facing a discredited Evatt at the head of a deeply divided Opposition, it was courageous—the bureaucrat’s euphemism for dangerous. Forty years later, a departmental secretary offering such frank advice might well have been given 24 hours to clear his desk, but not for a moment did it dent Casey’s confidence in Tange.
This was, of course, advice and not decision. Tange always expected that his advice would be heard but accepted that the minister (or the Prime Minister, or a group of ministers, or the Cabinet) would take the policy decisions. He would abide by, and faithfully implement, those decisions and he was always careful to ensure that he had ministerial authority for the politically sensitive instructions he sent to diplomatic missions. Nevertheless it is clear that Tange’s advice and actions during the various crises of 1954–55 were consistent with the directions implied in the ‘Policy Critique’. On the Geneva Conference, his advice to the government was that Australia should seek to put itself ‘in the best possible position to learn what is going on, to express our views, and to influence the trend of discussion and of decisions’. But he also recognised that it was the major powers that made the important decisions, while small powers who pressed their claims too hard would be brushed aside. (At this time newspaper headlines habitually referred to ‘the Big Two’, ‘the Big Three’ or ‘the Big Four’ when the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain or France met.) So Menzies and Casey accepted observer status at Geneva, which at least gave Australia the opportunity to watch developments closely and to offer advice in the margins of the conference.160
The ‘united action’ crisis of April-May 1954, although overshadowed for most Australians by the Petrov defection and the election campaign, proved one of the most stringent tests of Australian diplomacy and, therefore, of the operations of Tange and his department. Menzies, Casey and their Cabinet colleagues played a delicate balancing act, sharing the British reluctance to support any American military involvement in Vietnam, where the French were suffering a humiliating defeat, but also anxious not to frustrate the Americans to the point of prompting an American withdrawal from South-East Asia. From the outset, the advice from Tange and his department pointed to the dangers of Western military intervention, which might provoke a Chinese reaction and would jeopardise Australia’s relations with Asian countries.161 This last concern was a constant theme in External Affairs’ advice in Tange’s time.
To avoid offending Washington, the Australians concealed their concerns over American policy for as long as possible, by referring to the imminent election, but by 26 May, just three days before the election, a clear statement was essential. At this point Tange—presumably with Casey’s authority, although this is not recorded—sent a long telegram to Australian missions, setting out Australian objections to American proposals. The military and political aims of ‘united action’ were unclear; it would risk Chinese intervention and thus a third world war; it would offend Asian nations; and it would forestall the attempt to seek an honourable, negotiated settlement at the Geneva Conference. For the first time, the telegram indicated that Australia would accept the partition of Vietnam as part of such a settlement. This was ‘a clear and forthright statement of Australian policy, echoing neither London nor Washington …’162 As such, it was typical of Tange’s approach, as well as a contrast to the policy on Vietnam that Australia would adopt when his tenure as Secretary ended eleven years later.
In the off-shore islands crisis, Tange helped Menzies to use the Commonwealth as a means of steering the United States away from an outright confrontation with China over an issue that Britain, Australia and New Zealand did not think was worth a war. Tange was at Menzies’ right hand when Menzies pursued this role, both in a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ meeting in London and when he went on to Washington to meet President Eisenhower and his senior officials. A consistent aspect of the advice from Tange and his department was the wary attitude towards the Chiang Kaishek (Jiang Jieshi) regime, now in control only of Taiwan and a few neighbouring islands but still claiming to be the rightful government of all of China and recognised as such by the United States. Tange and his colleagues believed, with good reason, that Chiang would try to entangle the United States in conflict with Beijing, that being the only way that Chiang would be able to reclaim control of the mainland from which he had been ejected in 1949. They also feared that the Eisenhower Administration might not be able to resist the pressures of the ‘China lobby’ in Washington towards such entanglement. Tange’s own experience of the influence of Walter Robertson, Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East, exacerbated these fears. Tange and his colleagues were also extremely concerned by hints—part of Dulles’s tactic of ‘brinkmanship’—that the Americans might even use nuclear weapons in a conflict with China. The thrust of departmental advice was therefore to support various initiatives, taken by Menzies, Casey and Spender, towards dissociating the tiny off-shore islands at the heart of the dispute from Taiwan and the Pescadores, the islands on which Chiang’s government was based.
In the early stages of the dispute, the Australians were effectively using fellow members of the Commonwealth, especially Britain, Canada and New Zealand but also India, as diplomatic allies seeking to constrain the Americans. Later, in April 1955, it was the British who let down the Australians, and ‘Canberra and London exchanged messages which on the Australian side were undisguisedly tart’.163
A week after his ‘Policy Critique’, in a sequel to the off-shore islands crisis, Tange and his department received a major policy setback. Casey took to Cabinet a long submission, prepared by the department, on the situation in East Asia, particularly the recognition of the Peoples Republic of China.164 It was the product of a major effort by Tange and the department to learn from the off-shore islands crisis and to move towards a more secure settlement of regional issues. Although the argument was ‘diffuse’,165 the submission clearly implied that Australia should join Britain and Canada in diplomatic moves that might, as part of a wider settlement, include Australian recognition of the Beijing government. In an example of his naive and clumsy Cabinet tactics, Casey apparently read out the entire 25-page submission, then described it as ‘largely an information paper’. He told Tange that it was taken ‘as a factual and objective analysis of a very complicated series of situations’ but that Cabinet ‘decided that we should take no unilateral or other action on this for the present at least’. In a rearguard action, Tange and his colleagues established that Cabinet’s decision did not rule out coordinated diplomatic moves towards a general East Asian settlement, but only that there should be no public action that implied Australian recognition of Beijing.166
The basis of this policy was clear enough, although Tange may not have known that Menzies would, within months, be telling a confidant that:
the Americans cause him more sleepless nights than anything else. Red China ought to be recognized. What does USA get out of refusing them recognition?… He [Menzies] went on to say that we have to play along with the Americans because we can’t live without their protection.167
The rejection of the 1955 Cabinet submission put an end to a period of diplomatic activism by the Menzies government on the China issue. Tange and the department now knew that Menzies felt that he could not confront Washington on this matter and that there was therefore no point, for the foreseeable future, in seeking diplomatic ways out of the impasse.
Immigration reform
During his demanding first year, Tange initiated pressure for reform in another area of continuing concern, although not one mentioned in his ‘Policy Critique’. In October 1954 he wrote to Casey of his concern that the Department of Immigration did not understand the impact of Australia’s restrictive immigration policy, almost universally known as the White Australia Policy, on Australia’s relations with Asian countries.168 Public servants in Immigration, he wrote, had long thought that External Affairs officers were ‘too soft and long-haired’ on Asian immigration, but he was determined to confront the difficulties that the policy posed for Australian diplomacy in Asia.
His aims were far from extreme. After consulting Australia’s diplomatic missions in Asia, Tange pressed for changes that would permit a limited number of ‘advanced’ Asians to be able to enter Australia and to gain permanent residence. Moreover, ‘mixed race’ applicants should only be required to prove that they had 50 per cent ‘European blood’ instead of 75 per cent. As later writers have noted, Tange and his External Affairs colleagues were arguing on the basis, not of morality or equity, but of ‘pragmatic managerialism’ and of the class-consciousness of the Asian leaders with whom they dealt. Tange pressed the view that Asian sensibilities were most offended by Australia’s placing ‘the most educated and advanced Asian individual … in the same category as unassimilable coolies’.169
For the moment, there were few results from this pressure, but the significance lay in the fact that Tange was raising the issue. As recent writers have noted:
It was Tange, of all the major policy-makers at this time, who seemed most alive to the nuances of effective Australian diplomacy in Asia—and to the fact that marrying the objectives of the Department of Immigration … with those of [External Affairs] was not going to be a simple task.170
His minister, Casey, was well aware of the problem, but reluctant to tackle the obstacles that impeded his desire for closer relations with Australia’s ‘friends and neighbours’ in Asia. Successive Ministers for Immigration, Harold Holt, Athol Townley and Alexander Downer, and their departmental secretary, Tasman Heyes, staunchly defended the existing policy, with the support of Menzies as Prime Minister. Substantial reform would require changes in the occupants of all those positions, but Tange made the first chips in the adamantine façade of White Australia, and he began to wield his chisel within his first year in office.
Administrative reform
At the same time as he was dealing with crises that set the shape of international relations for years to come, and tackling the conflict between Australia’s immigration and diplomatic policies, Tange began to institute a major set of administrative reforms. In some respects, as he recorded, Tange was carrying on tasks that had been started by Watt but the scope of Tange’s actions was much wider and the energy that he imparted much greater. Even before he officially took up his position, he signalled that he would fully assert his prerogatives as permanent head. In December 1953, before leaving Washington, he was discussing the details of proposed appointments and office structures with Watt and Waller, expressing firm judgments on individuals and ensuring that movements did not take place until he was convinced of their wisdom.171 He also told Watt that he was troubled by Casey’s tendency, in private conversations and press releases, to claim personnel decisions as his own. ‘I hope,’ Tange noted, ‘it is nothing more than carelessness and perhaps an unimportant failure to appreciate the traditional and statutory distinction between the sole responsibility of a Permanent Head and that of a Minister of the Crown.’172
Casey was indeed inclined to blur this distinction, generally with noble motives. He took a close personal interest in the senior officers of the department, both at home and abroad, to the point that he sometimes seemed to be acting more like an especially senior departmental head rather than as a minister concentrating on policy and politics. He made a point of telling Tange that he conducted an extensive personal correspondence with heads of diplomatic missions, to ensure they did not feel neglected, and urged Tange to do likewise. Tange took the point but noted that letters from heads of missions that combined policy advice (which should be shared with the relevant desk) with personal comment (which should remain confidential) caused him ‘to waste many minutes juggling about trying to decide whether the whole letter should get distribution or it should be carved into pieces’.173 As will be noted in the next chapter, he developed his own format for personal correspondence with several heads of mission, in ways designed to avoid wasting precious minutes.
